


Pour des couronnes de glace | For the crowns of ice

by FLWhite



Series: Chamonix [2]
Category: SKAM (France)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Angst, Bipolar Disorder, Blow Jobs, Eliott POV, First Time, Frottage, Hand Jobs, M/M, Mania, Manic Pixie Dream Boy, Masturbation, Mildly Dubious Consent, Psychosis, Suicidal Ideation, The Cold Never Bothered Me Anyway, Winter, in the end it doesn't even Matterhorn, the alps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-12-06 22:26:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18226214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FLWhite/pseuds/FLWhite
Summary: A woman, hair stiffly bleached, calls toward them, calls the stranger; the two syllables lance with soft pangs through Eliott, radiantly. "Lucas?"Lucas. It is Lucas. Lucas Lucas Lucas.The blue outlining Eliott bursts into resplendent gold.*While on a trip by himself to his frozen kingdom in the mountains above Chamonix, Eliott meets his destiny.*The events of my darling@ryuujitsu's"Chamonix," told from Eliott's eyes. Read that marvelous piece first, or I can't promise the following will make much sense.





	Pour des couronnes de glace | For the crowns of ice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zetaophiuchi (ryuujitsu)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryuujitsu/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Chamonix](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18162464) by [zetaophiuchi (ryuujitsu)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryuujitsu/pseuds/zetaophiuchi). 



> Songs to accompany: ["Faded"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ItHLz5WEA), ["Kill Our Way to Heaven"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAPhp9LYq44), and ["Silver & Gold"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEPlcCQdWSw), in that order.  
> *  
> [@ryuujitsu's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryuujitsu/pseuds/zetaophiuchi)the bestest. <3 you, babe.  
> *
> 
> If you're having a hard time, thinking of self-harm, or just need to talk, please try to reach out. [Here](https://thelifelinecanada.ca/help/call/) are some hotlines and chat lines from around the world. You are more than worth it.

A tatty, ancient edition of _Mont Blanc: Hiking Trails and Environs,_ pilfered from the school library.

Sketchbook. Two pencils, an eraser, his favorite pen.

Underwear and socks.

As afterthought, a toothbrush, thrown in naked among the other things.

The small black-bound notebook he begins to put into the knapsack, too, but at the final moment changes his mind and slots it into the back pocket of his jeans, with a burst of pleasure at how neatly, how perfectly it fits there.

The bag is light but his heart is lighter as he closes the apartment door behind him without locking it. What need for locks has he, anymore, now that he has begun his escape to heaven?

*

He takes the aisle seat on the bus, first row, rising every ten minutes, then every five, to stretch, to pace the narrow sticky meters between the somnolent stinking bodies. He is warm, too warm; he stuffs his sweater into the overhead compartment, wedging it into the hood of his coat. It would be heaven to take off his T-shirt, too, but he must wait, he must wait. He cuffs his jeans two more times as compromise.

The middle-aged woman next to him eyes him. Many eye him as he walks, first toward the lemony stench of the bathroom, then, reversing, back to the front, once, twice, ten times, thirty. He smiles at them, each in turn, with the benevolence of an emperor returning to his throne. He ought to have taken that half-bag of miniature, foil-wrapped chocolate bûches de noël from the pantry. Then he could have cast them among these ranks of adoring subjects. A largesse. He continues smiling. They will forgive him the oversight. They are a grateful people.

*

Chamonix is a glory. His realm, never visited, but always his. The sun peals from the white-crested mountaintops and the sharp steeples of the bus station's roof. He is loathe to put on his coat; the teeth of the cold are beautiful against his exposed neck, wrists, a band around his navel where his T-shirt has ridden up under his hastily pulled-on sweater. The air's sharpness tastes of clean blue paradise in his nostrils and throat. Eventually, though, more eyes, many eyes, fall on him, standing still and blissful among the bobbling hordes in his hooded sweater with the hood conspicuously down. He dons the scarf and coat grandly, with majestic sweeps of his arms, a toss of his head, luxuriating. The gloves he draws on finger by finger.

*

By the time he finally unlocks the door to his room at La Folie Douce, he can see a vibrating aura of purest silver all around him, sparkling; unlike the little flecks of snow that had begun to fall as he walked from the station, this silver does not melt or blow away. It rings him lovingly, shimmering as he throws off his outer layers, then his T-shirt, and presses his face against the window. Of course there is no view of them, his magnificent shards of bleached rock against the deep-blue sky, but he can imagine them: Giant's Tooth, the Green Needle, the Doleful. He shuts his eyes, seeing them arrayed there in the peachy-red dusk behind his lids. He bids them welcome with all his warmth, takes their cold shoulders between his hands, kisses their stony cheeks, one by one.

*

At suppertime he is under yellow lights, walking, walking, eyes cast upward toward the looming spine of blue above. Mont Blanc seems to bow at him, an ancient baron greeting his liege; he bows back grandly, imagining himself capped also with a snowy wig. He withdraws the small notebook from his pocket and his pen, beginning to draw: two jagged lines for the flanks, one curling one for the clouds, a dot for the moon. A quartet of young women in crisp new ski jackets, all blonde and not unpretty, sidle next to him and ask him to take their photo, though a selfie stick very obviously protrudes from a large tote bag one of them has slung over her shoulder.

He points this out to them, but they insist: he is an artist, they can tell, he will do a far better job. He rises from the lip of a concrete ring, in the center of which is planted a juvenile tree, on which he has perched. He holds out his gloved hand. He is a generous prince.

The silver aura shudders and fizzes as the phone is presented to him, however; louder and louder the buzzing grows, until, wincing and shaking his head, he drops the phone, pinched between thumb and index finger, back into its owner's hand. The buzzing drowns out whatever sounds the girls' flapping lips make until they finally turn away.

He returns to his seat on the concrete ring, picks up his pen, but the light has shifted and the mountains are darker, their edges bleeding like ink into the cold vast sky.

*

There is a charger for his long since powerless phone stowed in its routine place in the knapsack, and it is not long after he plugs it in with an exciting little sparkle from the wall socket, back in La Folie Douce, that the cold plank of glass and aluminum begins to chime and trill and chime again, bar after bar of white sliding down the screen. It is not too easy for him to read, but he doesn't need to be able to see the letters clearly to know who it is leaving him voicemail after voicemail, who has caused the little red circle to rise above the icon for text messages. It is distinctly pleasant to slide his thumb left, left, left, clearing each of the pale boxes with a cartoonish _poof_.

He has no need to speak to her, or to anyone else. A message, written very clearly with this same pen he now twirls between his fingers, had been taped squarely on the door of his room, with a border of curlicues. _Do not be frightened._ _My kingdom is come. I search now alone for my crown of ice_. Scribing this, he had wished that he had not become delinquent in his progress through _An Introduction to Old French_. How majestic it would have been to leave his parents with the _langue d'oïl_!

He has brushed his teeth, not because they feel dirty—he has eaten nothing since dinner the night before, or perhaps it was two nights before?—but because it is so nice to rustle the bristles against his teeth in time with the gentle pulsing of his aura. The same for the thrumming of the hot water of the shower on his flesh.

Now he is lying flat on his back on top of the coverlet, not because he is weary, but rather the opposite: he's quite hard under the clean pair of briefs into which he has put himself. Putting the pen down on the pillow next to him, he palms himself idly through the cotton, without heat. It is a little bit of a nuisance, but he has so much to do, too much to do, to ready himself for greeting his court. Uncapping his pen and sitting up, then standing, then pacing, he opens the little notebook and begins to list the necessaries. First, he will walk on the Void.

*

The shuffle through banks of thickly muffled people is interminable; the ride up in the gondola, rocking lightly, should never have ended. With his craggy courtiers in his eyes, he wanders the the Needle of Midday, then to the enclosed box of glass that is the Void.

At last. Surrounded by rock and snow and sky. He shutters his eyes halfway against the sun, feeling it seep deliciously into his blood through his slippered toes, the point of his nose under the smothering warmth of his scarf. Even the sunlight is better here than below, or than anywhere else. His aura rings and rings like a thousand tiny bells.

There is a slight noise behind him, another pair of feet on the glass, and the bells are instantly still. He regards the stranger. A boy, a small boy perhaps a year younger than him, tentatively stepping forward, a beautiful boy, a boy in whose cold-reddened hands he immediately wishes he could be held, held close, held forever. "Over there, that's Mont Blanc," he hears his own voice as though from a kilometer away. The silver hovers around him without blinking, waiting for the boy to speak. The boy says nothing. His eyes, large under firm brows, their blue as distinct from their white as though chips of stone had been inlaid in bone, flick-flick around the box of glass, landing on Eliott's and flitting away again.

"Scared?" The silver remains quiet. Perhaps it begins to change color, but he is too busy smiling at the boy.

"No," comes the reply, even before Eliott has reset his tongue for his next words.

"And there is the Matterhorn." He waves a slow hand through two hundred and seventy degrees as he introduces the others. The silver is certainly changing color; from the corners of his eyes, he sees it softly, softly shifting blue, blue as the boy's eyes, blue as the infinity beyond them both. "Come here," he tells the boy. "Aren't you scared?" And the boy comes, and still there is no buzzing, no sawing pain, nothing but elated blue. He indicates the beautiful blade of the Täschorn, he tells the boy of Berhault and cornices. The boy is scared, and Eliott tells him so. So many words, more words than his throat has let out in two days. And still he speaks. He cannot cease his words. They make the stranger blink slower, swallow, shudder; Eliott can almost imagine the coolness of the stranger's earlobe against his burning tongue.

He wants to smile, and he needs to show this to the stranger. He twitches his scarf to his chin to do it. The stranger needs to see him, know him. He speaks further of cornices. He raises his hand. The aura's blue glows like a neon light. When the stranger asks if he had climbed there to the Needle of Midday, he laughs. But then comes the sullen man, the ignorant guard of their immaculate Void, resistant to all pleas.

But the magic of the Void has not broken, even as they are chased from it; the stranger speaks, still, to Eliott. A woman, hair stiffly bleached, calls toward them, calls the stranger; the two syllables lance with soft pangs through Eliott, radiantly. "Lucas?"

Lucas. It is Lucas. Lucas Lucas Lucas.

The blue outlining Eliott bursts into resplendent gold.

Lucas is with his parents. Lucas is staying in the town below. Lucas is very, very bored. Lucas's eyes lose their hard, flighty shine and fix on Eliott's as Eliott takes down his phone number. He hears a second name, as deliciously full of the flavor of sun as the first; and the owner of both will come to him tomorrow, tomorrow, be all _his_ tomorrow, be all his tomorrows.

*

This time, lying back against the scratchy coverlet on the creaking mattress in La Folie Douce, his thumb over the crown of his cock and his fingers tight around it, he imagines Lucas above him, beside him, suffusing him with heat the color of melting gold, tasting of semen and sugar.

The glow of satiety does not last long enough for him to fall asleep, but he is behind on his lists again, and with Lucas waiting for him, there is no time to waste with sleeping. He circles his room, but it is not enough; he slides into his coat, and half-jogs through the corridors to the blissfully frozen air outside.

*

When Lucas runs up to Eliott, waiting at the little station with its little train, he looks almost more beautiful than the sky itself. His eyes are crackling under his tumbled hair. His fingers, seized in Eliott's, pound with his pulse; Eliott, through the material of his gloves, feels Lucas's heart, the electric tingle of Lucas's nerves. Lucas's knee, touching his, sings, and the gold of his aura grows stronger and brighter, nourished by Lucas's voice and his, braiding together in the narrow stretch of warm air between them.

He can hear, clear as though shouted, the words behind Lucas's whispered "Yes, and us?"

 _Kiss me_ , the words say. _Use tongue. Put your hands into the hair above my temples. Press your thumbs against the corners of my mouth. Mold me tenderly to you, a king to match you._

For the time being, he replies merely with his eyes: _I will. I will._

*

The vale of snow onto which they are deposited by the cable car is a terrible sight. What should have been a formidable knight of pure ice, his rows of sabers and lances glinting blue, one of Eliott's mightiest vassals, lies on the brink of his inglorious demise. Ghosts of his former might and beauty cling to him.

Eliott cannot help but let his grief show a little, and his anger. The gold shivers lightly for the first time around him, tightening, as he waits for Lucas's answer.

"Fucking fluorocarbons," he hears, and with the sensation of a lock's tumbler being turned at last by its key, he smiles, because he has done it, he has found the light to illuminate his snowy realm, to cast warmth onto its cols and couloirs. And now all that remains is to lead his king into his icy palace, celebrate their union, and enter their nuptial chamber.

*

Everything is as it should be. The dancing to celebrate his ascension to the throne has already begun. Revelers quake and jump under black lights, their bodies gleaming, stippled with neon. _Don't stop don't stop_ , a voice diced into bits by infinitely keen blades that gnash and shoot off bolts of electricity cries, _don't stop don't stop don't stop don't stop_. He has his hands planted on either side of Lucas's tousled head; the ice of the grotto wall is a pleasantly biting cold through his gloves, against his scalding palms.

He describes the scene of the party, _their_ party, to Lucas, speaking fast, while he presses his body forward until he can go no further.

As they lean together to crush all the remaining space of ambiguity between their mouths, he feels something in him sigh. The glowing of the gold grows momentarily blinding.

There are other people, many other people, many eyes, eyes fastening on the back of Eliott's head, Lucas's upturned face, his gloved hands roaming the terrain of Lucas's cheeks, neck, temples, whatever can be reached. But with his new, royal magic, he simply ignores them, and with cartoonish _poof_ s they are gone.

*

His palace is well-appointed, and he shows Lucas it in the leisurely fashion appropriate for royalty: the massive throne, glistening in splashes from multicolor lights, where he is crowned; then, to his bedchamber, rather _their_ bedchamber, and its magnificent bed. Lucas is content, he can tell; he looks achingly young with his hair spread on the ice, where they lie together like the effigies of medieval sovereigns, except their hands are not folded piously before them, but gripping tightly around each other.

In a low sweet stream, he tells Lucas of what he'd imagined in the burning night, when the firm warmth of Lucas's skin under his fingertips was only an anticipatory pleasure; of turning, in the town square lit with snowflake-shaped lights strung overhead, thinking that he saw Lucas in a dark corner, where the illumination wavered and broke against Lucas's own radiance.

Of his awe, of his wonderment.

His mouth feels full of flowers, of the petals of daisies, of spring greenness. He confesses his love, and Lucas shines even brighter, holds him even tighter. Lucas, the Lovely. Lucas, the Bright. Lucas, Lightbringer, eyes like Heaven.  He needs no one else beside him.

*

He's not sure why his Lucas's face turns sad, or angry—he's not sure which—but the sight makes his aura stutter, it makes his neck prickle. Lucas rises, and there are words, a barrage of words. He parries, he cajoles, but he resigns himself presently and allows Lucas to pull him to his feet. With a pat on the footboard of his kingly bed, he leads Lucas from the neon-lit corridors of hollowed ice, onto the metal steps that clang like windchimes, skipping up them, over the patches of sand-strewn verglas and dragging his hands along the railings decorated, just for him, with tiny cascades of frozen drips.

It is impossible to be sad, because Lucas is still with him, Lucas is breathing behind him, a small and beautiful star.

To his star, in the steadily descending cable car, he points out the Bushy Needle and the souls of the dead that he can see whispering around its perfect point. Perhaps Lucas is afraid, he realizes, like he was in the glassy Void. But surely Lucas can see that, with himself the star and Eliott the king, there is nothing to fear? He thinks for only a single heartbeat before he knows what he will do.

*

His star refuses his first tribute, the buzzing phone stripped of its locks, each bright bar slipping across its screen naked for any eye. He expected this. Who would want glass and aluminum and the feeble voice of a distant and forgotten queen, when their bodies touching was gold and silver, silver and gold?

He goes gladly, greedily, to his knees to worship his king, his luminary; Lucas's sweat tastes like strawberries and his cum like champagne and the face of his orgasm is like a nova, strewing its glowing guts in curling gauzy strands rippling outward through the dimming air. Like an avalanche, cleaving a needle in two.

He drinks Lucas. What tender favor! What chivalric honor, in this toast, this toast to begin the real feast of their celebration!

Hail, Eliott the First, Emperor of Ice. Eliott the Mad, Madly in Love.

*

They banquet, conjoined at the eyes. He flames with impatience. It is impossible not to. For forty-five minutes he sits, the fat hard gold of his aura thrumming, across from Lucas, watching the boy he loves consuming meat and slick pasta, soft burning cheese and its frigid companion, all sprinkled with snowy sugar. Watching the soft dark rose of Lucas's mouth around fork and spoon. Lip sticking a little to the tines. He draws a heart with the toe of his sneaker against Lucas's boot, then again, and again.

*

The mountain's chill enlivens him; the sugar of the cocoa that Lucas buys him laces together, with white crystalline strings, his burning bones. They course the streets, are in and out of the tiny oven-like shops, unstoppable. He laughs and laughs at Lucas disappearing into a too-big beanie patterned like a hedgehog, with fuzzy quills and tiny ears; Lucas laughs in turn when he puts a baby's raccoon cap atop his head, the little banded tail flopping against his temples.

Again outside, two men of green bronze beckon to him. He follows their eyes and remembers the mountain, and his royal duty.

To his greatest vassal he must declare himself, and his consort, whom he draws alongside him on his perch; he must be seen by the solemn old peak ere he mounts it. He must sing out this bursting delight. He joins the men on their stone and announces his love. All must hear the voice of their sovereign, so that they may rejoice in his joy, and the aloof ancients of ice and stone towering above most of all.

He is young; he is powerful; he will make his barons bow at his feet. Under his feet.

His companion on the boulder in the ugly bronze hat points to the objective, the zenith of this snowy world, the only goal fit for a king such as himself. He will bring his Lucas along, to light the way.

He darts from the boulder, to show Lucas where to follow; the cobbles feel tender like peaches and plums under the thin rubber soles of his sneakers, and the gold ringing him vibrates, thrums, an arpeggio in _vox angeli_.

Then it cracks and begins to drift in pieces like decaying gilt around him; he tastes it, the infinite bitterness of coal, shrieking under his tongue.

Lucas. Where is Lucas?

He sprints back to the square, his breath even, his shoulders relaxed, even as the world wobbles, even as each scrape and thump of his feet rings painfully loud. Here stands his little star, his beautiful prince, and he can already smell the tears that are rising.

No, he cannot leave Lucas behind, though the mountain's voice booms like his own blood in his ears. He bends, he kisses the lovely face, wipes away the lines of wetness like he is erasing bad dreams. He recaptures his king with his arms clutching, his mouth, and is recaptured in turn.

He presses Lucas's bare hand in his gloved one and groans in relief as the golden light of noon once again snaps into place around him, around them both, shielding. If he cannot bring Lucas now to their real and noble stronghold under the ice, then he can at least take them both to his royal pied-à-terre here, among the eyes and lumpen flesh of mortals.

*

Eliott can feel the tension in Lucas's body twanging delectably as he steps forth into the room. His own eagerness dances, raising its long arms, swirling and swiveling as it caresses him. No rug, no fire, no decapitated beasts to adorn this temporary abode, but Lucas does not run, Lucas does not turn from him, listening instead with hungry eyes to his stories.

He offers a drink of his ancient wine; Lucas takes it, and with that truly becomes Eliott's forever, his consort in this and all universes. All the spices, and a secret one, a drop of blood from Eliott's own heart, are now dissolving into Lucas's flesh, absorbing into each secret inner part, every pink and pulsing cranny. His clothing is more than ever an obstacle; he yearns to draw himself, a blade of ice, and present himself to Lucas to be melted.

He watches Lucas tear off coat, sweatshirt, long-sleeved undershirt, jeans, pause a moment with thumbs under the waistband of his underwear like a diver hovering with toes curled over the edges of a springboard. He watches, and he touches himself with unhurried strokes, being careful not to let his pulse run too hot, or too quickly.

Let them, two swords, draw the life's blood from each other slowly, let them bite into each other with the infinitely deliberate pleasure of a sweet thing, eaten when already full.

But his balls are tight and his prick is crying, _no, faster, now, now, we need him._

So he crushes himself against Lucas, seeking to be absorbed. The ridges of muscle along Lucas's belly and capping his arms are a little surprising, but just as tender under his teeth as he could have wished. He inhales the salt of Lucas's arousal as he pushes himself, rutting, against the velveteen heat of Lucas's balls and taint, the determined firmness of his cock.

"I'm flesh," he says, a reminder, to himself as well as to his beloved boy. Meat on this platter of silver, garnished for thee. Meat that loves only thy salt. "Touch me," he commands, and Lucas obeys.

Lucas's hands, a little too large for his frame, clamp and clutch at Eliott; Lucas's fumbling fingers overwhelm his defenses. His lance shatters, he is unhorsed, he is fallen, gladly; he throws his gaze to the ceiling and moans.

Through the haze of sensation, he catches sight of the face of the boy he loves, the lips lax, the eyelids trembling, pleading for pleasure, and he masters himself. Lucas needs him, and he will first give before he takes. He thrusts Lucas backward, garlands his shoulders with Lucas's bare legs, turns his head right, then left, to kiss the knob of Lucas's ankles.

Lucas trembles, beneath him, offering, eager, and he pays homage, bucking his hips, fascinated by the judder of Lucas's toes and the tiny spasms of his thighs to the sacred rhythm of their bodies. He continues his tales, the words tumbling wantonly around the cry of ecstasy building, drop by golden drop, in his throat. He sings of trespassing into Lucas's paradise and the density of perfect flesh that would envelop him there; he whispers of staining the warm fur under them, of pooling themselves together, of Lucas praying for his deliverance, and he for his.

"Yes," Lucas says, and calls his name. "Yes." Lucas's hand around him is like a glorious, relentless vise. He submits to it, shutting his eyes, letting himself be drowned by commingling rivers of ice-cold silver and flame-hot gold, his mouth contorting in the trembling air.

"I love you," he reminds Lucas, once he is able. "I love you," he says, taking Lucas's cock between his palms. "I love you," he tells Lucas with his eyes as he dribbles a line of spit onto the flushed cockhead, spreading the slickness with his fist flying fast and hard. _I love you, I love you, I love you_ , his aura trills, as Lucas shouts and bucks and quakes to the squeaking accompaniment of the mattress.

He kisses his sleepy star. He can never have enough, not until he is entirely consumed.

The touch of their lips together is a warm wind that billows Eliott's embers again into flame; he clings to Lucas, he kisses Lucas's spent cock. He gently places Lucas to receive, then not so gently drives himself between Lucas's damp thighs. He admires the shiver of the bedside lamp on the gentle hilltops and shallow valleys of Lucas's back, the slick slish-slush of himself squeezed by Lucas, cradled, drawn finally out of himself with a long sharp stab of agonizing pleasure.

*

Of course he does not sleep.

A king must be ever vigilant.

Lucas dreams, and murmurs Eliott's name. Eliott, guarding him, pacing the room with his pen and sketchbook in hand like spear and shield, bends to smell his hair, taste the light salt of his nape, lick carefully at the downy place where jaw meets neck. He laughs aloud. A star, in his bed! A young king, all for him, here! He breathes in the glad fragrance of bliss. He settles against the foot of the bed, rocking on his elbows, and begins another portrait of Lucas, then another.

*

Outside, the stony towers are singing under the remote eyes of stars. He can hear them, even if he cannot see them.

 _Yes,_ he nods at them through the frigid windowpane. _Yes, I will come now_ . He looks with love at the bed and the boy in it. No need now to carry Lucas with him, when the pure brilliant shine of his own little star is reflected in his aura, his armor of gold. The love of Lucas has burnished it and made it invulnerable. He will show his strength to the mountains, he will stand with one foot on the singular pebble that forms the apex of the world. _Yes, I am coming_. He dons his coat, his furred mantle; he hops, bumping into the corner of the wobbly desk, trying to jam his feet into his recalcitrant shoes.

Lucas awakens, and is afraid. But he promises Eliott to come along, to be at his side in his inevitable conquest. Some tears of utmost happiness wet his lashes as he returns to his beloved and lets himself be held. Lucas is still a little afraid, he can hear it in the unsteady rasp of Lucas's breath, so he tells Lucas more stories, reassuring ones, of the perfect journey that they will make, come morning, together, of the stones that will never touch them, of the snow that will taste as sweet as cream, of the sun and sky that will arch infinitely overhead when they kiss at the summit. At some point, he falls asleep.

*

He wakes, not as intolerably hot as he has been feeling, these past days; Lucas is very still and very warm under him as he halfway rises and brackets Lucas's hips with his knees.

"Darling," he tells Lucas, cupping his cheeks, kissing him with veneration. "A few hours more. A few hours more, it'll be morning. In the morning, we'll go. We'll go together."

"Together." The word pours joy into him; brimful, he lays himself as close to Lucas's warm side as he can, and shuts his eyes to the tender fingers against his temples, combing slowly through his hair.

*

He dreams of summertime. Lucas, unseen, a golden glow next to him, humming. Hanging billowing white sheets on a line with him.

In an instant, a thunderhead builds, the gray of mountains, the gray of forgetting, and erases the sun. Lucas continues humming, humming a slow song that he does not recognize, but he shivers awake.

No thunderstorm. He is safe, abed. And Lucas is there, fingers still shuffling, softly, through Eliott's hair. He is breathing a little heavily.

It is still dark; a tawny streetlight casts impenetrable, violent shadows through the window. His aura is gone.

He tries to lift his head and greet his beloved, but his neck aches; his shoulders, too, and every fiber of muscle in his arms. His legs barely twitch in response to his will, as though trapped under ten meters of snow. His mouth is as dry as stone; his voice is trying to elude him. "Lucas," he finally is able to say. He feels very cold; even Lucas's name in his mouth feels stiff, frozen.

Lucas nods once at him, face in shadow apart from a gleaming lozenge over one cheekbone.

"Lucas, you're here." The lozenge of light quivers and shatters as Lucas raises the hand that had been in Eliott's hair to his own face. There is a little pause, during which Eliott thinks he might slip again into asleep; he struggles, trying to kick his feet against the undertow. All his beautiful ice has melted at last; he is alone in this ocean, sinking. "Is it morning?"

For another while, Lucas says nothing, his breath held. Then he replies from above, shifted now fully into the shadows, "Not yet. Go back to sleep."

Eliott's body responds beyond his control, shuttering his eyes and weighting his limbs; even as he tries to keep his face above the waters, they close overhead.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this, please let me know with a kudos/comment, and check out my other stuff here. You can also follow me on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/xiangyu).


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